Edward Feser, a philosophy professor, writes on Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy, religion, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and critiques of modern science claims.
HN commenters link his posts as accessible sources on topics like neurobabble, papal fallibility, and arguments for God's existence.
The article was an entertaining read. However, it contains a few errors.
First, Spinoza was not an atheist. He was a pantheist. He identified nature/universe with God and tried to overcome the infamous "mind"/matter duality posed by Descartes by claiming that both were but aspects of the infinite substance, namely, God. That is, he subscribed to a certain panpsychism. Comparisons to Buddhism are actually very superficial. Other attempts at surmounting Cartesian dualism included Malbranche's occasionalism which claimed that God was the bridge between the two (there is a humorous anecdote that on his deathbed he was asked what good the world is if God was the cause of our ideas, after which he purportedly sighed in realization and died).
Second, I don't know what it is about Hume, but he seems to be quite popular among those with little philosophical background...which would be fine if there were some humility attached to the enthusiasm. Hume is notorious for misunderstanding Aristotle, never having read his works, and relied instead on mediocre secondary sources. Furthermore, (his) skepticism is self-defeating and incoherent. I found a good link that describes some of the objections for those who are interested: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2009/06/hume-science-and-religion.html
Third - and this is more of an observation - Buddhism, and perhaps especially of the ostensibly Tibetan Californian variety, seems to be one of those dying fads in some aging academic circles…
Non-human intelligences has been considered over the centuries / millennia:
* https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/aliens-and-the-catholic-church
I'm not sure there's a 'definitive' statement as of yet as to AI, but things tend to be leaning towards needing to be biological:
* https://www.catholic.com/audio/caf/can-artificial-intelligence-have-a-soul
* https://www.ncregister.com/interview/the-mind-and-the-machine
Not sure if this means carbon-based or not:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry
Some thoughts from a philosophy professor (who is Catholic):
> 2. “But neurons do what logic gates do. So we know that computers can be intelligent, because they are essentially doing what our brains are doing.”
> No, they aren’t. True, there are causal relations between neurons that are vaguely analogous to the causal relations holding between logic gates and other elements of an electronic computer. But that is where the similarity ends, and it is a similarity that is far less significant than the differences between the cases. Logic gates are designed by electrical engineers in a way that will make them suitable for interpretation as implementing logical functions. No one is doing anything like that with neurons. In particular, no one is assigning an interpretation as implementing a logical function, or any other interpretation for that matter, to neurons. (The point is simple and obvious, but commonly overlooked precisely…
You start getting into 'no true Scotsman' arguments at this point. Is the only "true" Christianity that which professes the Nicene Creed? Teaches the Real Presence? Other?
However, just because the Mormons are using the same words (from the same book) does not necessarily mean that they have the same theological concepts:
> This brings me to an example which does involve error of a sort sufficient to make successful reference to the true God doubtful. In the post on Geach linked to above, I cited the 2001 decision of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that Mormon baptisms are not valid even though they seem at first glance to make use of the correct Trinitarian formula. The reason for the decision is that the Mormon conception of God is so radically different from the Catholic one that it is doubtful that the words truly invoke the Trinity. It is not Trinitarianism per se that is the issue, though, but rather the radical anthropomorphism of the Mormon conception of God. As an article in L'Osservatore Romano summarized the problem at the time:
[…]
> The Mormon conception of deity, then, makes of God something essentially creaturely and finite, something which lacks the absolute metaphysical ultimacy that is definitive of God in Catholic theology and in classical theism more generally. Even Arianism does not do that, despite its grave Trinitarian errors. To be sure, Arianism makes of the second Person of the Trinity a creature, but it does not confuse…
> If we could understand human thought at a similar level, we MIGHT find out that "the feeling of red" is not fundamentally different than "the understanding that 1 + 1 = 2", and we could come up with quantifications of it in different ways, from the physical representation in the brain to a certain "bit pattern" in the abstract model of the human brain computer.
I guess the idea is that an abstract concept like "the understanding that 1 + 1 = 2" would be easier to "quantify" in the relevant sense than "the feeling of red", but I don't think that's true.
The very concept of a representation presumes an intellect in which that representation is mapped to the underlying concept. No particular physical state objectively signifies some abstract concept any more than the word "dog" objectively signifies that particular type of animal. But our mental states must be able to do so, because denying this would be denying our ability to engage in coherent reasoning and therefore self-defeating. So those mental states can't be "implemented" solely using physical states.
This argument was actually proposed by the late philosopher James Ross and developed in greater detail by Edward Feser. [1] A similar argument -- though he didn't take it as far -- was made by John Searle (of Chinese Room fame). [2]
But in any event, I would reject the notion that any representation of "the feeling of red" is equivalent to the sensation itself.
> Note that the argument for qualia is not one that…
> And that is why modern readers typically do not understand the argument. For example, they often think it is an attempt to “define God into existence,” as if Anselm believed that arbitrarily attaching certain meanings to certain words could tell us something about objective reality. But this is to confuse what Scholastics call a nominal definition – an explanation of the meaning of a word – with what they call a real definition – an explanation of the nature or essence of the objective reality a word refers to. Anselm is ultimately concerned with the latter, not the former. While he no doubt thinks that any reflective language user will agree that the notion of “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” is implicit in his use of the word “God,” the more important point he is driving at is that being that than which nothing greater can be conceived must as a matter of objective fact be of the essence or nature of being divine, just as (to use a stock modern example) being a compound of hydrogen and oxygen is of the essence of water.
* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/11/anselms-ontological-argument.html
Which also has the stronger critique of the argument:
> The lesson is not that Anselm’s argument is unsound so much as that it presupposes knowledge (i.e. of God’s essence) that we cannot have. Moreover, the idea that reason points us to the existence of that than which there can be nothing greater is something Aquinas himself endorses as long as it is…
Why do you think that the human mind can contain semantics but a machine cannot? This argument needs some sort of dualism, or what Turing called "the objection from continuity" to account for this.
FWIW I don't think that the "triangularity" in my head is the true mathematical concept of "triangularity". When my son e.g. learned about triangles, at first the concept was just a particular triangle in his set of toy shapes. Then eventually I pointed at more things and said "triangle" and now his concept of triangle is larger and includes multiple things he has seen and sentences that people have said about triangles. I don't see any difficulty with semantics being "a matter of image", really.
Why do we believe that semantics can exist in the human mind but cannot exist in the internals of a machine?
Really "semantics"
I had come across this Catholic philosopher: https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/03/artificial-intelligence-and-magical.html who seems to make a similar argument to this; i.e. that it's the humans who give meaning to things, "logical symbols on a piece of paper are just a bunch of meaningless ink marks"